>>Hard to say. Engineers seem to gravitate towards monetary quick fixes, be
>>they the gold standard or post-Keynesian credit schemes. They also think
>>the system could be run rationally, like a machine, as if you could just
>>design your way around greed, violence, and irrationality. Economists are
>>sort of like that, in their own way.
>There used to be a guy in Ottawa who ran for parliament every election
>under a whacked out social credit platform (ie printing money) called John
>Turmel, aka 'The Engineer'. He was that approach personified.
Probably the most well-known former proponent of social credit was the sf writer Robert Heinlein. His early left-wing history didn't really come out until after his death, but the signs were there all along in the early writing. You can read a sf treatment of social credit (which, although a crank scheme, at least was a crank variant of socialism) in his early novel _Beyond This Horizon_, which is quite different in many ways (and yet very much the same in others) from his later novels.
The wikipedia entry on Heinlein is very interesting--better than the libertarian socialist entry, that's for sure!
John A
Thanks,
John A
see me fulminate at http://www.jzip.org/